Music for Your Weekend

 

World Domination Enterprises - Too Bad (I Can't Control Myself)

This is a post-punk band active in the 80s that is currently pushing out unreleased singles on their bandcamp page. 

Here are two versions of this song. The "RnB" version is just my cup of tea. Playing it while driving will increase speeds by at least 20mph. The "Rangalanga box" version is also quite good, much more drum-machine bedroom post-punk which needs to be a genre explored more. 

HUSHPUPPY - Singles Club (Remastered)

Here is a repost of an artist named Zoë Brecher and their incredibly catchy lo-fi pop music. 

Worthy of reposting for several reasons: Brecher has been making waves lately, getting more notoriety and well-deserved spotlights. She sat in as house drummer for Late Night with Seth Meyers recently, and also recorded with none other than the state bird of New Jersey himself, Bruce Springsteen, on his latest 60's soul covers record "Only The Strong Survive". 

Also - when first posted on Spacerockmountain - there was only a digital and cassette tape version of this available. But now there is vinyl! Blue or Yellow. It being Bandcamp Friday, all proceeds go to the artist, so that's cool.

Vangas - Facial Tissue

I've been digging through stuff I downloaded years ago to find some gems I never wrote about here. Vangas seems tailer-made for Spacerockmountain because it's aggressive scuzzy noise rock. 

Coming out of Georgia, this band makes music that's heavy but experimental. Maybe Unwound meets Pissed Jeans gets you close to what you'll find here. 

And with track names like "I Have Three Faces and I Hang With Dogs" (which is an awesome track) and the over 9 minute closer, "Two Men Fucking" you have music that's fun for the whole family, really. 

Required listening.

Burger Shot - Small Town Glory

There is undoubtedly 99% terrible music on bandcamp so when something unique finds the ears, my brain becomes magnetized. I'm not a connoisseur of the Vaporwave genre, and this could not quite qualify as that, but whatever this is... I fucking dig it.

Burger Shot is from Jackson, Wyoming and a project between two individuals, billybob and drey. They tagged the music herein as "Americanawave" which feels accurate. The music is like modern country, slowed way down ala Vaporwave, and chopped minimally like a wedge salad. 

Have you played a record at 45 instead of 33 by mistake, and liked it better that way? This is the opposite experience. 

Novampb - Too Cool For Words (2015)

Another new artists to Spacerockmountain sent in by a returning label. This time it is the Recife, Brazil-based label, Transtorninho Records. You know, the dudes that released Lindberg Hotel, Amandinho and 151515. So you gotta bet this'll be good too.

Novampb is an electronic artist from the Brazilian coastal city of Maceió. The songs he makes are lo-fi IDM or glitch, composed with an excellent sense of dramatic timing. They come of as incredibly cinematic works on the base and then through a deft use of sampling spoken word audio he's added a feeling of disembodied otherworldliness. I'm told he's putted these clips from youtube, and sounds like a kindred soul spending too many hours listening to sounds pour out of a computer. It takes me back to when I first became familiar with lo-fi electronic music from the artists like Ocelote Rojo, Turning Torso and LAY BAC. Of course all of these have their own flavors and while it can be hard to put Novampb's style into words your ears won't have any issue identifying its unique charms. I recommend giving all of Too Cool For Words for word a listen and don't stop before the end, as the final two tracks are my favorites.

To be had here:
Novampb - Too Cool For Words

Blue Diamond - It's A Puppy's World (2015)

Every now and again there's this strange sort of album that comes the Spacerockmountainway. A weird bedroom project that's hard to describe and is dissimilar to most other things on the blog but are at the unified in that aspect. Blue Diamond has fallen into this category nicely. It is most definitely the work of a dude with eccentric tastes made tinkering away alone only sharing it with us all now that he's completed the strange tunes. As usual, I'm eating this shit up.

Blue Diamond is a guy from La Quinta, California and he's taken some old, warped 80s new age/new wave sounds and mixed it up with some truly bizarre vocal stylings, including some answering machine message recordings. The whole album gives a sort of vaporwave vibe, striking similarities to SODA lite in the instrumental parts. For as strangely and purposefully awkward it seems at times, there are some songs on this album that transcend it all really shine as great pop gems, such as delight tune "Boatful Of Weed Crashes Onto Nude Beach."

To be had here:
Blue Diamond - It's A Puppy's World

SODA lite - Slice of Life (2015)

Vaporwave is a genre/concept I am very much still wrapping my mind around. This isn't the first time I've had this sort of music on the blog, in fact I have had it on here long before I knew what it was all about. In fact, I don't think there's is, nor truly could be, a unifying artistic message in vaporwave. What is shared by musicians producing it is a knowledge of new age easy-listening radio songs, electronic dance music and nostalgia-provoked styles like chillwave/glo-fi. However, this can be a pastiche, a parody or some creative admixture of both these notions.

The Melbourne-based musician using the moniker of SODA lite surely has his own opinions on what he's trying to say with this album, but this blog is about my conjecturing ultimately. Firstly, no matter what intentions were involved, I genuinely think these tunes are pretty fucking sweet. Slice of Life bears many similarities to albums I've written up before such as Candy Claws, Beat Connection's Surf Noir EP, even Monster Rally. Ephemeral electronic music with usual beats and sounds culled from what to seems to be the listener's own hazy memories. It is genius really and it provides that feeling I get when reading the first chapters of a book by a great writer. The turf is often familiar but all the details are distorted and the insights skewed. What makes SODA lite different is the context it has pulled its inspiration, namely that new age and easy-listening yuppie sort of music I mentioned at the top of this write-up. Yet by picking it apart and reconstituting it SODA lite as given it an enticing significance that new age shit always lacked for me. 

To be had here:
SODA lite - Slice of Life

Youtube Channel Spotlight: EAZY PEAZY, LFSWICKED, ARTZIE MUSIC

Youtube has achieved a rather dominate role distributing media to the masses: using views, shares, and likes as a sort of social currency, viral videos are possible by endlessly accumulating clicks, reposts, and likes through facebook and tumblr--sites a majority of internet uses obsessively update on the daily. Youtube even has it's own commercials now where they promote some person's channel, which of course has 5mil+ subscribers already.

If only Youtube would promote completely random channels with hardly any followers, a channel run by some person that isn't type A. Well today I will attempt to shed light on three channels that I really enjoy, that all specialize in their own music videos promoting some of today's freshest soundcloud ableton obsessed "producers" around----!!! Some of these channels seriously post some of the best retro synth music today (looking at you eazypeazy), while the others sort of cater to whatever is *more* popular. Each has an aesthetic, some more mature than others, but they all are making music videos. These filmmakers participate as equal creative forces in fostering a vaporwave aesthetic as the musicians producing the tunes; their power is not to be underestimated.

Let us start with LFSWicked

This youtube channel has below 500 subscribers, which is a shame because this channel posts some great music. This channel also uses great film footage--EXPANSION by Toshio Matsumoto is featured in this ESPRIT空想 video. This channel also posts full albums. Recently eco virtual's atmospheres 2 and macross' a million miles away were posted for listening pleasure. Whoever runs this channel knows what's up, and consistently uploads essential jams//

Choice Vids from Wicked
luxury elite - carousel

Architecture in Tokyo - ヒスイ MARBLE (ft. ULTRA ウルトラ)

Capo Blanco - Carribean

LAY BAC - KASUMI(孤独)

Next Artzie Music "# 1 destination for unique music"

This channel has close to 10,000 subscribers. This channel also posts a lot of essential jams: SAINT PEPSI,オウムのジャングルPARROT JUNGLE 95, MIRROR KISSES, DREAMS WEST, etc. etc. This channel is real good if you are new to this whole internet music thing. Fred will show you tip of the iceberg, peazy will take you into the lower depths

Choice Artzie Music Vids
MAITRO - Snake Way 蛇の道

CVLTVRΣ - ☯TempleＧｏｌｄ☯

ESPRIT 空想 - SUMMER NIGHT

Last EAZY PEAZY -- This is by far my favorite channel out there to discover this type of music. The aesthetic is so on point, the music is carfully curated, the grotesque underbelly of capitalism is exposed in all its plastic glory. Peazy puts together a bunch of videos for a bunch of artists, and luckily these are artists that are relatively unknown. Each video compliments the music perfectly, it is hard to formulate into words just how perfectly these videos capture that vhs aura.

check out the vidz

betamaxx - take me back 私を取り戻す

cougar synth クーガーシンセ - denying everything すべてを否定

baby sloth spirit - fossil future

friday fantasy 金曜日ファンタジー'86 ハードウェアコンピュータ！

there are other youtube channels out there that do similar things --- here is one that I won't review. Just go out there and explore, you are bound to find some interesting channels.

マクロスMACROSS 82-99 - A Million Miles Away

The new Macross album is fantastic, it's as simple as that. I imagine some readers of this blog have been following macross for a while now, so you already know what to expect from macross--he does not disappoint. The quality is on point as per usual, samples are phenomenally arranged and manipulated, and the mood Macross evokes with his music brings to mind the renderings of 90s anime--cities full of neon lights, people dancing and sweating, futurist motorcycle gangs cruising through a techno-dystopia, that oh so fashionable dystopian chic pervasive to much cyberpunk anime. These phenomena culminate into a nostalgic fever pitch which interpellates and fetishizes japanese culture through an unabashedly glossy musical lens.

Clearly this hauntological approach interpellates the musical listener as a nostalgic subject, and thus solicits more perverse and extreme nostalgic longings for cultures and time periods that hold no memory within the subject. But instead of condemning the current state of music for being 'stuck in the past', 'musical pastiche' or 'manufacturing nostalgia'; suspension of time (atemporality) should be seen as a positive creative force of the present. If we conceptualize time as a linear sequence of events (ie the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, 00s, etc etc etc.) we allow ourselves to dissect the present into a 'present past' and a 'present future' that both meet at a 'present now' which is more or less the quilting point between the two. We need to expand our 'present now' beyond this particular moment--allow it to be seen as still alive and at work within some sort of "zeitgeist." There have been no revivals, there is no surf or garage or synth pop revival, just mining the musical terrain and language which is in a constant state of becoming, something that doesn't end every 10 years. Using musical genres (punk being but one example) as a form of human identity facilities the discourse of subjectivity that plauges and transforms creativity as discreet scenes that have a time and place, a memory which is the private possession of those who "were there." These are some things to ponder and maybe flesh out. Either way, the new Macross achieves something far greater than contemplating about it, it is music of the now age, it is pop, it will make you want to dance, it will make you want to watch cartoons, it will allow you to "be there." This post suffers from no actual musical criticism//this dude likes 7th chords//better

Favorite songs: Horsey, Night In Tokyo Pt.II, 82.99 FM (first sample is Marlene - ESP), and Lovers

for free here, but missing 82.99

bandcamp for $1


KEATS//COLLECTIVE Vol. 5 released today and free as of right now

esprit 空想 - virtua.zip (2014)

This is my first post on this blog, so allow me to introduce myself: my name is Evan. Okay, so this past week esprit 空想 released his last installment for this particular moniker. esprit 空想 has been making some of my favorite plunderphonic synth funk music, and I certainly consider his music to be on par with similarly funky contemporaries in the "vaporwave" "future funk" scene (lux, macross, reverb lite (b), ultra, yung bae (yumi?)). Honestly, esprit 空想 does something most of these other bands don't/perhaps can't do; he actually composes the music and uses samples as "a brushstroke rather than a canvas." Not that there isn't anything to be said about utilizing samples as a canvas, but the fact that these songs are built from scratch is something that gives esprit 空想 a sort of authenticity that can't be diluted by recognizing a song in a sample and thinking, "my gaht, the original was so much better, is this abomination trying to ruin the song?" example of such https://soundcloud.com/therealyungbae/waves-bansheebeat-yung-bae the original song is entitled Mermaid by Tatsuro Yamashita--you may like it, but I can't help but cringe at yung bae's interpretation. The point being, esprit 空想's music speaks for itself rather than through something else, which makes his music particuallarly compelling. Would it be pertinent to talk about the aesthetic dimensions at work within this particular scene and esprit空想's music? Probably not, there has been so much "critical theory" done to this genre so far, I figure the best approach is to just listen. Go take a gander and immerse yourself in some funky synth music reminiscent of John Maus, Roland Young, Dwight Sykes, and VHS warble. Reminiscent may be the wrong word/// to be had hear